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The Trouble With Democracy in the Middle East

In his recent speech before the National Endowment
for Democracy, President Bush pledged that the United States would
embark on a decades-long commitment to bring democracy to the
Middle East. But democracy is not a gift President Bush can bestow
on people in distant lands.

Although the goal is laudable, the Bush administration will be
disappointed with its effort to establish a stable liberal
democracy in any Middle Eastern nation. That’s the verdict rendered
by history, the contemporary reality of the region, and our own
government experts.

Today, the Middle East lacks the conditions, such as a
democratic political history, high standards of living, and high
literacy rates, which stimulated democratic change in, for example,
central Europe and East Asia. Ironically, many Arab countries are
ruled by authoritarian leaders who are more liberal than the
citizenry they lead.

President Bush’s speech ignored a classified Feb. 26, 2003,
State Department report that expressed doubt that installing a new
regime in Iraq will foster the spread of democracy in the Middle
East. Written by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and
Research, the report argued that “even if some version of democracy
took root … anti-American sentiment is so pervasive that Iraqi
elections in the short term could lead to the rise of
Islamic-controlled governments hostile to the United States.”

President Bush’s pledge also ignores the traditions and values
of America’s system of government. In trying to build a democratic
Middle East, the president and his neoconservative advisers ignore
the most basic principle of human existence: People don’t like
being bossed around. They particularly don’t like being bossed
around by foreigners.

And while the president noted that the number of democracies in
the world had grown from just 40 in the 1970s to over 120 today,
and while he correctly predicted that “over time, free nations grow
stronger and dictatorships grow weaker,” the belief that the United
States can accelerate this process is based on the same fatal
conceit that brought down the Soviet empire: namely, that
governments, and especially foreign governments, can realistically
dictate noble ends.

Ronald Reagan understood this as well as anyone. President
Bush’s speech deliberately drew comparisons to President Reagan’s
June 1982 speech, in which Reagan predicted the imminent demise of
Soviet communism because it failed to respect individual rights and
to reward individual creativity. And we all know of Reagan’s
mistrust of government. Revealingly, the United States spent
hundreds of millions of dollars on democracy programs in the Middle
East during the 1990s with no noticeable impact.

Instead, as the president declared, the success of freedom rests
upon the willingness of free peoples to sacrifice. But the people
of the Middle East, not the people of the United States, must make
these sacrifices. Indeed, heavy-handed attempts to force democracy
upon the region by military conquest will ultimately prove
counter-productive toward those ends, as the events in Iraq are
showing us every day.

The nationalist sentiments that we have now inflamed in Iraq can
easily be perverted by those, such as Osama Bin Laden, who are
committed to returning the Middle East — and indeed, the entire
world — not to a hopeful, democratic future, but rather to a dark
and dismal autocratic past.

President Bush’s speech drew comparisons to other important
speeches of the past, speeches that celebrated America’s commitment
to the highest principles known to man: freedom, democracy, and the
rule of law. Bush might also have quoted British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill, who declared in his famous 1946 Iron Curtain
speech that “we must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the
great principles of freedom and the rights of man,” but that “it is
not our duty … to interfere forcibly in the internal affairs of
countries.”

Churchill urged the Free World to lead by principled example,
not to impose such principles by force; adopting the latter course
risks subverting these principles from within, and thus eroding the
foundations of our own democracy as we propose to build new
democratic foundations abroad. The reality is that the ingredients
for successful democracy are found in domestic political kitchens.
Democracy is a dish that Iraqis and others throughout the Middle
East must prepare for themselves.